F1’s greenwashing shows how sport is shirking climate responsibilities

Formula 1 is a sport with a growing fan base – mostly thanks to the success of the Netflix documentary Drive to Survive, which trimmed the fat on a motorsport series that has often shot itself in the foot over the years with complex and opaque rules, dull sporting spectacles and a lack of affordability for fans.

Alongside its apparent growth in popularity, F1 now visits more nations than ever before, with a calendar that has expanded significantly over recent years.

With that expansion in venues has come an increase in emissions, as the thousands of staff responsible for putting on a Grand Prix – from the teams, to the caterers, marshalls and media – increasingly travelingl the globe to follow the series.

But F1 doesn’t want you to talk about that – and has done a great job of silencing the motorsport media by buying up large swathes of it. Today only a handful of publications and blogs aren’t owned by a monopoly with vested interests in teams and the Championship.

Instead, F1 is eager to greenwash and shirk its responsibilities in the face of the Climate Crisis.

Today we look at the damage F1 is doing, why its claims about net zero action are bogus, and why their greenwashing needs to be called out.

Based on our own calculations, the average F1 staff member who attends each race of the season can expect to travel a distance of 170,700 km each season – this is three times more than the 1% who cause half of global aviation emissions

This figure doesn’t include additional travel for testing or PR event, doesn’t account for the ever-expanding calendar, or the prevalent use of private jets in F1, which are 14 times more polluting than commercial airliners.

With the majority of F1 staff based in the UK, the typical team member attending every race in the season will have a carbon footprint of over 28.99 tonnes. This is on top of the 8.34 tonne carbon footprint of the average UK resident, which covers everything from food, to driving, and tech and clothing consumption.

This means the average person in F1 attending all the races – be they team personnel, media or other – has a carbon footprint 7.9 times higher than the average person on Earth.

Therefore, the average F1 team has a carbon footprint of 2,899 tonnes of CO2 per season from travel alone, meaning that the 10 teams on the F1 grid account for 28,990 tonnes of CO2 per season.

“During a 20-race season, F1 will get through 40,000 sets of tyres”

Then there’s the disposable nature of F1. Every tyre created for F1 cars is flown to each event and then flown back to Pirelli afterwards to be destroyed – regardless of whether it was used or not. Even when they are used, they are designed to artificially degrade faster in order to increase the spectacle of the sport.

During a 20-race season, F1 will get through 40,000 sets of tyres.

For more on how rubber is a leading cause of deforestation in tropical forest, see this article from Nature Communications.

That’s not to mention how energy-intensive creating carbon fibre or running wind tunnels is, nor the emissions created at events by media, merchandise, food vendors or travelling fans.

F1 is, by its very nature, a sport of excess and waste.

• Claim: Sustainable fuel development continues to ramp up with a 100% sustainable fuel on target for 2026

Reality: How many academic papers or real-world tests do we need to show that burning fuels is not sustainable in any way, shape or form?

F1’s so-called ‘sustainable fuels’ are biofuels which are crops grown for the purpose of making fuel. These have repeatedly been proven to either compete with land used to grow food, thereby worsening food shortages and driving up food prices – or they are directly linked with increased deforestation and biodiversity destruction to create new land for crops.

This destruction of woodland reduces our ability to absorb carbon emissions while also creating new emissions by burning these crops as a fuel. In this way F1’s ‘sustainable’ fuels are considerably worsening the Climate Crisis and public health.

Electrification is not only more efficient, but also offers the opportunity to power vehicles solely from renewable energy, benefitting public health and reducing air pollution.

• Claim: Fuel designed for real world use, with huge potential to decarbonise automotive sector

Reality: And therein lies more greenwashing about their ‘sustainable’ fuel. Alongside worsening deforestation and increasing food shortages, the idea that continuing to liquid fuels that are burned to power vehicles is ridiculous, and worsens air pollution causing thousands of avoidable deaths per year.

Internal combustion engine vehicles are also vastly less efficient than electric cars, and can never be run on renewable energy, whereas EVs can.

F1 and manufacturers are using this as a way to shirk responsibility for the Climate Crisis and evade the cost of investing in research and development of EVs. Remember that ICEs are much cheaper to produce, so this is a way that manufacturers can keep their profits high until ICEs are banned in 2030 and beyond.

• Claim: Recruited sustainability specialists & improved internal infrastructure to ensure progress

Reality: Good, this is an act that all businesses should be doing to understand their role in worsening the Climate Crisis.

The issue here is that F1 has not put in place any transparent system for external reporting, nor any measures for if they fail to meet their paltry commitments.

The fact that this is so opaque and internal should ring alarm bells. It’s very much like FIFA’s internal report into alleged corruption which found that, surprise, surprise, FIFA wasn’t engaged in corruption.

Which later, independent external reports found was very much the case.

• Claim: Delivering more events using alternative energy sources like solar panels, green tariffs, and biofuels

Reality: Beware any corporation that uses the term ‘alternative energy’.

‘Alternative’ suggests that oil is still the only valid and viable option – and we shouldn’t be surprised that a company that has spent as many decades promoting oil as it has tobacco, has a vested interest in perpetuating this myth.

We can see this in their aligning of renewable energy, such as solar panels, with biofuels and the vast harm that the latter creates.

Even green tariffs are greenwashing, with energy companies trading credits rather than actually committing to using renewable energy. All of this continues the use of fossil fuels that worsen the Climate Crisis and human health.

• Claim: Reducing single use plastic across our events

Reality: Great, but so what?

Considering that F1 is heavily promoting oil companies through their title sponsor, Aramco, the amount of oil being used in plastic at events is very little compared to that consumed by the cars on track, the planes in the sky, or the cars on the road that the sport is used to promote.

Yes, the sport should absolutely ban plastic – but this is something they have been braying about for a long time, and yet a friend who recently attended a race in the US found that plastic waste was strewn everywhere – despite promises that new ‘sustainability initiatives’ had been put in place, which frankly amount to putting the onus for change on the individual, and not on F1.

These are empty words that are not being backed up in reality, and this is frankly the easiest measure to nail immediately. And they’re not bothering to – as this empty press release from May 2021 shows.

• Claim: Planning for future calendar regionalisation underway

Reality: This is one of the few measures that could make a real impact. By grouping races together, they’ll reduce the distance that freight will travel between races.

However, the vast majority of team personnel (and often freight) returns to the factory or their country of origin between races. Unless this is stopped – which would have a big impact on personnel’s personal and family lives, especially with ever-expanding calendars – grouping races will have very little real impact on F1’s biggest source of emissions.

If F1 were serious about making progress on transport emissions, they would mandate that personnel and freight must travel by sustainable means, such as using public transport to travel to races in Europe. Furthermore, they would outlaw the use of private jets by all teams and their drivers.

Motorsport or Extinction

Motorsport – like an increasing number of sports – is eager to say that it there is no place for politics in sport, while doubling down on dodgy deals with human rights-abusing regimes and increasingly partnering with unethical sponsors.

In fact, the FIA, which governs global motorsport, has now imposed a ruling that drivers can no longer make “political, religious or personal” statements without prior approval. These are the actions of a dictatorship – and their previous President was known for making repeated racist and sexist statements.

Regardless of what the motorsport community itself thinks, it is as susceptible to the Climate Crisis as the rest of us, and its continued greenwashing makes us all more vulnerable while they profit from ever-increasing emissions.

Be in no doubt, we are at the start of the sixth mass extinction. Big greenhouse gas emitters must be held responsible for their actions, and motorsport is no different. When they refuse to listen and actively silence dissenting voices, the only action left is a boycott.

Note: For transparency, the figures relating to the emissions of F1 personnel were calculated based on the 2019 F1 calendar. Emissions were calculated based on the average team personnel’s flight in economy class from London Heathrow – the closest airport to the majority of teams – to the nearest airport to an F1 race.

MyClimate, an independent non-profit organisation was used to calculate the emissions per flight.

To calculate each teams’ personnel emissions, all average flights were multiplied by 100 members of staff – the average number of personnel to attend a race, according to Autosport.

What To Read Next